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Monday, November 3, 2008

Album Of The Day- Bison B.C.-Quiet Earth (2008)

"Imagine yourself walking down a quiet path in the middle of a dusty plain when suddenly you hear a rumble in the distance. At first you just ignore it, it’s probably thunder or something equally as harmless. You continue walking but the sound gets louder and louder and before you know it you’re beneath the smashing, crushing, beating weight of a stampede of giant creatures bent on grinding your bones into dust.

That is the sound Bison bc brings to the table with their Metal Blade debut album “Quiet Earth”. Calling this album Quiet Earth is tantamount to referring to Slayer as a pop band but any and all damage you suffer at the hands of Bison bc is well worth it. Quiet Earth is not so much a blend of rock, doom, metal, chaos and noise as it is the musical equivalent of the end of the universe.

The first explosion of this end comes with “Primal Emptiness Of Outer Space” which intros with a slow sludgy build up, one that seems destined to explode into a fast paced verse. This is just one of the surprises Bison has in store for you on this album. The song explodes but at the same sludgy tempo which is oddly unsettling. Bison bc seem to thrive on creating this kind of unsettling tension in their music. The band never stops adding things to their songs, layered guitars, explosions of percussion and then this screeching vocal line all of it tied up by a sheen of sheer chaotic noise. This balancing act is a tough one but Bison bc make it look easy.

It’s hard to look at an album like Quiet Earth in a song-to-song way because it feels more like a juggernaut of destruction. I don’t mean a concept album because the topics of Quiet Earth jump from epic science fiction to the myth of the Wendigo so little is connected here. What does unify Quiet Earth is the sound itself, each song crashes into the other one pushing the record along almost forcing it to move against itself. The songs push and pull against each other building tensions and dynamics with every turn.

Within all of this chaos Bison bc keeps the groove going, it’s almost like a Chaos Theory math problem you can bang your head to. Interestingly enough there isn’t much in the way of traditional riffs on Quiet Earth but there are endless grooves. I’m not sure how Bison bc manages to unleash such savage grooves without any formulated riffs but sometimes you just have to let art flow over you.

It’s clear from listening to Quiet Earth that Bison bc write in a style that can only be described in the most scholarly manner as really fucked up. Things happen in Bison bc songs with no rhyme or reason almost as if their idea of structure is to have no structure. A song like “Wendigo Pt 1” is an eight minute opus the seems made up of a constant explosion of varied sounds all happening at one time while “Dark Towers” is a quick three minute groove fest that seems to grease the way for it’s neighbor track “The Slow Hand Of Death”. Quiet Earth is a metal record, a doom record, a noise record, and a prog record and somehow those elements add to the power of the album instead of getting in each other’s way. This is a phenomenal record that makes absolutely no sense at all. Fuckin A I love that!!

There are those that will hate this album because it’s not easy to define or because they could never use it as a song on Rock Band. Quiet Earth is a beautiful mess, a heavy groove laden total collapse of the song writing process. Like anything that is truly primal this album is unpredictable and at times a little scary.

To me that is what music is, something that slaps me around and wakes me up instead of cradling me in the arms of that which I’ve heard before. Bison bc and Quiet Earth have no desire to cradle you instead the music would rather crush your bones into powder and eat your organs. That, my friends, is what art is all about." (Iann Robinson, Nonelouder.com)